CRIMINAL VICTIMIZATION SPRING 2011 Methods of Data Collection Kendral Harpe 2/9/2011 This paper is to state the different methods of data collections for victims. It will include the creator and the start of the methods. It will show the strengths and the weaknesses of all the methods. It will give my opinions on the methods.
INTRODUCTION: As one would learn from majoring in Criminal Justice, crime reporting is not exact. No one will know how much crime really goes on in the country because of varies reasons, such as; underreporting, the police department changing the statistics and falsification of reporting. There are some data collections the government uses for statistics. The main ones are victimization surveys, self-report surveys, call for service, Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) and National Incidence based Reporting System (NIBRS). All the reports are different and are done different ways. Some are more accurate than others, but all of them do the same job; gives the government some of the statistics of the year. UNIFORM CRIME REPORT: The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. (Uniform Crime Reports, 2011) At the time it was argued that among the variety of official data, not only were "offenses known" closest to the crime itself, but a more constant relationship existed between offenses committed and offenses known to the police than between offenses committed and other official data; assumptions shown to be erroneous by victimization surveys many years later. (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011)In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States. (Uniform Crime Reports, 2011)
The UCR is the largest database that is used for statistics in the United States. Within the program, there are two methods of collecting crime data: the traditional Summary reporting system and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). These two methods collect a vast amount of data that are accessed by the general public, researchers, media, and others regarding the levels of crime in the United States. However, as with any program, users are likely to have questions about how the information is collected and presented. (Britt, 2011) The statistics are based on data submitted monthly by the fifteen thousand municipal, county, and state law enforcement agencies, which have jurisdiction over approximately 98 percent of the U.S. population. (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011) The problem with the UCR is that this is just the reported crime and not all crime is reported, so that means the statistics are not accurate and is not showing the real statistics; which means the United States could be more dangerous than reported to be. The other problem is that property crimes are counted or reported differently than violent crimes. For example, if you steal three items from a store, it is reported as one larceny, but if one beats up three people there are three counts of assaults, so property crime is unreported. The other problem is the definitions of the crimes in the different places. What may be battery in one city may not be the same in another city; which makes the statistics inaccurate. Another problem is the population never changes with the statistics and everyone knows the population change every year (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). Even though the UCR has its problem, it is the report that is the most accurate and the report that shows more in dept crimes than any other. At least one knows these crimes happened instead of a survey which one could be deceitful.
NATIONAL INCIDENCE BASED REPORTING SYSTEM During the 1980s, law enforcement agencies sought to improve official reporting methods, particularly the UCR. In 1985 the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the F.B.I. released Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. This blueprint outlined the next generation of official reporting methods, specifically the National Incidence- Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Starting with 1991 data, the UCR program began to move to this more comprehensive reporting system. While the UCR is essentially offender-based, focusing on summary accounts of case and offender characteristics, the NIBRS is incident-based, seeking to link more expansive data elements to the crime, included in six primary categories: administrative, offense, property, victim, offender, and arrestee (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). Unlike the UCR, which is limited to a relatively small number of F.B.I. index crimes, NIBRS provides details on forty-six offenses. This specificity allows for more accurate reporting of the offense, as well as improved ability to analyze other characteristics of the crime. The offense category also examines conditions surrounding the event, such as drug or alcohol involvement at the time of the incident, what type of weapon, if any, was used, and whether or not the crime was completed. Segment three deals with the property aspects of the incident, such as the nature of the property loss (i.e., burned, seized, stolen), the type of property involved (i.e., cash, car, jewelry), the value of the property, and if the property was recovered and when. The fourth segment, victim, and lists the characteristics of the individual victimized in the incident.
The victim's sex, age, race, ethnicity, and resident status are presented and, in cases where the victim is not an individual, additional codes for business, government, and religious organizations are provided. Each of the victims is linked to the offender, by the offender number and by the relationship between the victim and the offender. Segment five focuses on the individual attributes of the offender rather than the victim. The final segment, arrestee, gives information on those arrested for the incident; the date/time of the arrest, how the arrest was accomplished, whether or not the arrestee was armed, and age, gender, race, ethnicity, and residence status of the arrestee (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011) Once again, this method is also known crimes and not all crimes are reported so that makes it not as accurate as it should but, but the good thing about it is that it is more in-depth than any other method. Uniform Crime Reports and National Incidence Based Reporting System are basically the same thing, but the NIBRS is more in-depth with specifics than the UCR. They use some of the procedures in reporting the statistics from the local agencies to the state. CALLS FOR SERVICES Calls for services are when the data is collected by the calls to report crimes. Some say that it is more accurate than other methods because the crime will get noted no matter what and some people tend to forget the past events or traumatic events that happen to them. This is a bad idea. What happens to the crimes the cops are not called to, but just see them along the way?
Plus, not all call that are called in are crimes, most of the calls to 911 are medical calls. Other problems are the definition of the crime. Let s be honest, the general population does not know the right name for most crimes and it isn t their jobs to know the name of it. SELF-REPORT SURVEY Surveys of self-reported criminal involvement are an important part of the improved capacity to illuminate the dark figure, in this case from the perspective of the criminal (or victimizer). The origin of self-report surveys predated victimization surveys by more than twenty years. Preliminary, groundbreaking research on self-reported hidden crime was conducted in the 1940s, but the method of simply asking someone about the nature and extent of his own criminal involvement did not become a recognized standard procedure until the late 1950s, with the work of James Short and Ivan Nye (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011) Austin Porterfield first used this variation of the survey research method of "selfdisclosure" by a respondent in 1946, to compare the self-reports of college students regarding their delinquent activities while they were in high school with self-reports of delinquents processed through the juvenile court. Not only were more offenses admitted than detected, but also more significantly, it appeared that the college students had been involved in delinquency during their adolescence in ways similar to those of the officially defined delinquents. These findings suggested that the distinction between delinquent and non-delinquent was not dichotomous, but rather more continuous, and that crime was perhaps distributed more evenly in the American social structure than official statistics would suggest. Fred Murphy, Mary Shirley, and Helen Witmer reported in 1946 that the admissions of delinquent activities by boys who participated in a delinquency prevention experiment significantly surpassed the number of
offenses that came to the attention of juvenile authorities. James Wallerstein and Clement Wyle conducted a study that remains unique in self-report research because it surveyed a sample of adults in 1947. They discovered that more than 90 percent of their sample of about fifteen hundred upper-income "law-abiding" adults admitted having committed at least one of forty-nine crimes included in the questionnaire (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). This method is not good. People tend to over aggravated about crimes and what happens to them to make them seem more like a victim and to be more dramatic. Once again the general public does not know the name of crimes and would put the wrong thing on there. From experience, citizens will tell one anything so they can leave their house or just stop calling their house. Another problem is not everyone that is victimized is surveyed, so how do you get the general public allover crime report from that? One could not. It wouldn t even be close. VICTIMIZATION SURVEY The National Crime Victim Survey (NCVS) is the victimization survey for the United States. In 1972 the United States became one of the few countries to carry out annual national victimization surveys. The NCVS is sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (within the United States Department of Justice) and is conducted by the Bureau of the Census. Its primary purpose is to "measure the annual change in crime incidents for a limited set of major crimes and to characterize some of the socioeconomic aspects of both the reported events and their victims" (Penick and Owens, p. 220). In short, the survey is designed to measure the amount, distribution,
and trends of victimization and, therefore, of crime (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). The survey covers a representative national sample of approximately sixty thousand households, and through 1976 it included a probability sample of some fifteen thousand business establishments. Within each household, all occupants fourteen years of age or older are interviewed, and information on twelve- and thirteen-year old occupants is gathered from an older occupant. Interviews are conducted every six months for three years, after which a different household is interviewed, in a constant process of sample entry and replacement (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). The crimes measured in the NCVS are personal crimes (rape, robbery, assault, and theft), household crimes (burglary, larceny, and motor-vehicle theft), and business crimes (burglary and robbery). These crimes were selected intentionally for their similarity to the index crimes of the UCR in order to permit important comparisons between the two data sets. The only two index crimes missing are murder, for which no victim can report victimization, and arson, the ostensible victim of which is often the perpetrator (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011) The statistics on victimization generated by the NCVS provide an extremely important additional perspective on crime in the United States. Ever since they were first published, the survey's reports have forced a revision in thinking about crime. For example, a report on victimization in eight American cities, using data from the very first surveys, provided striking confirmation of the magnitude of the underreporting and non-reporting problem identified in the pilot projects. Comparing the rates of victimization and crimes known to the police, the
victimization data showed fifteen times as much assault, nine times more robbery, seven times the amount of rape, and, surprisingly, five times more motor-vehicle theft than reported in the UCR for the same period (U.S. Department of Justice) (Britt, Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics, 2011). Victim Survey and Self-Report Survey is one in the same. With both of them, the survey is randomly done by people in a household that may or may not have been victimized of a crime. The samples of people which are chosen represent the population as a whole and the number of people is chosen by the population size. The problems for both, people fabricate situations, the victims of crimes may not be in the sample of people chosen, some people still will not report a crime, some people may not know what the crime they have went through and some people just forget the situation in which they were put in. In general these surveys are done to illuminate the dark figure of the crime statistics. The dark figure is the crime that isn t reported to the police or anyone. The thing about that is, if the victim did not report the crime to the cops, what is going to make them report it to someone working for the police? They aren t. It doesn t work that way. The dark figure will continue to make the statistics inaccurate. The problem with all the methods is the society and the underreporting of a crime. It s good to know numbers for the crimes, but if the numbers aren t accurate, it gives the society an illusion of the crime situation. Therefore, no one really knows what is going on in the world dealing with crime and if they know something, they don t know everything. The methods are the best the government can do because they can t make people talk about what they have been through or what they saw someone else doing. One would get more accurate numbers if they were to combine two
methods, such as UCR and Service of Call. Think about it, they would have the actually number of crimes called and the numbers the police have. No, it wouldn t be perfect, but the numbers would be more realistic than what it is as of today.
Works Cited Britt, R. L. (2011). Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics. Retrieved February 2011, from Net Industries and its Licensors : http://law.jrank.org/pages/2167/statistics-reporting-systems-methods-unofficial-crimestatistics.html Britt, R. L. (2011). Statistics: Reporting Systems and Methods - Unofficial Crime Statistics. Retrieved February 2011, from Net Industries and its Licensors : http://law.jrank.org/pages/2164/statistics-reporting-systems-methods-official-crimestatistics.html Uniform Crime Reports. (2011). Retrieved February 2011, from FBI: http://www.fbi.gov/aboutus/cjis/ucr/ucr